Libcom Makhnovist material

The red Cossack who led a revolt against the Bolsheviks in the Don region

Iakov Efimovich Fomin was born in 1885 in the Cossack hamlet of Rubezhnoe in Elenskaia stanitsa in the Upper Don district (stanitsas were the village units of the Cossacks, primary units in political and economic administration). He served in an elite Don Cossack unit from 1906. He is described as being six feet tall with a red beard.

A short biography of Brova, Makhnovist commander, anarchist communist and associate of Maslakov

Brova was born into a peasant family in the village of Novogrigorevka, in the Ekaterinoslav province of the Ukraine. From early childhood, he worked as a mechanic–locksmith at the station at Avdeevka Yuzovsky.

An account of the Maslakov mutiny in the Red Army which threw the Bolsheviks into consternation.

“ Beside me on the big bay horse raced Brigade Commander Gregory Maslakov. This was a man of great physical strength and desperate courage. There were in his behaviour major shortcomings, but courage in battle, the ability to win over the soldiers by personal example to achieve victory atoned for them.” Budyenny’s Memoirs

A short biography of Dermenzhi, Potemkin mutineer, Makhnovist commander and anarchist communist.

Dermenzhi, whose first name remains a mystery for the present, was born in the Ismail district of Bessarabia, within the Russian Empire (and not in Georgia as Skirda states). He came from the middle class. He began to work in the electrical and telegraph services.

A short biography of Ossip Tsebry, Makhnovist partisan who carried on the armed struggle into the 1940s

In 1993 the Kate Sharpley Library produced a pamphlet Memories of a Makhnovist Partisan, a translation from the French of an originally Russian article that had been included in a booklet by Alexandre Skirda on Makhno. The article had originally been serialised in the Russian exile anarchist communist paper Dielo Truda-Probuzdeniye in 1949 and 1950. It was written by one Ossip Tsebry.

A short biography of Avraam Budanov, who fought with the Makhnovists and continued an underground struggle after the defeat of the movement

Avraam Budanov was born into a peasant family in Slavyanoserbsk in Ekaterinoslav province. From childhood he worked as a fitter in Lugansk. He became an anarchist-communist in 1905, and took part in revolutionary activities in the Donbas basin between1905-1907. In 1917-18 he was an activist of the anarchist movement in the Ukraine, organising anarchist groups and unions among the miners.

New books from AK

Juan Garcia Oliver, the activist who became the world’s only anarchist “Minister for Justice” tells of his life in the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), and gives his account of the Spanish Revolution and Spanish Civil War.

Direct Action is the classic statement of revolutionary syndicalism. Against the slavery that is capitalism, Pouget proposes not faith in the go-betweens of parliament (or union leaderships!) but workers’ own action. Action to win small victories, strengthening and inspiring the working class for the big one: the destruction of capitalism and rebuilding society from the bottom up.

Thanks. Both the Gulag project and the KSL are in my link list, and I have featured the KSL before. I couldn’t see how to get the feed for the recent material, though, but will feature this stuff in one of my next Archive of Struggle posts.

The August 1915 cover of The Masses draws attention to the lynching of Leo Frank, which took place on August 17 in Marietta, Georgia. The drawing is by Robert Minor, later a major CP figure. Max Eastman, the magazine’s editor, was traveling in France and an account of a discussion on the war between him […]

History of the Surrealist Movement Gérard Durozoi University of Chicago Press, 2002 This massive work, originally published in France in 1997, is actually a history of surrealism as it manifested itself in the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and film. The movement’s core literary expression receives short shrift in the book’s 800-plus pages. The political b […]

Readers of Criticism &c. may find this panel at the upcoming Left Forum (New York City) of interest: Left Forum Panel: Deepening Technological Changes in the Workplace, Workers’ Organizing, and Marx’s Mature Critical Theory John Jay College 524 West 59th Street Room 127 Sunday May 31, 3:40pm – 05:40pm Karl Marx, in his works Grundrisse […]

The Socialisme ou Barbarie Scanning Project web site is back online with a nice new design. Criticism &c. hopes to review the newly-published history, Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing by William Hastings-King, soon.

As the war in Europe transformed into a virtual stalemate, American socialists intensified their discussions about the conflict and future prospects for the international socialist movement. The International Socialist Review continued to carry news from Europe as well as analysis of the ramifications of the capitulation of the International’s leaders to nat […]

A wraith-like figure from the U.S.’s still-not-entirely forgotten anti-Communist past briefly flickered across the field of American historical perception in mid-October of this year. The revelation of the July death of David Greenglass, brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg, resulted in nothing like the full-on cultural and political debates over the guilt or […]

Covers of the International Socialist Review and Mother Earth Magazine from December 1914. War was well underway in Europe and, while isolationist sentiment and Wilsonian neutrality still predominated in the U.S., the pro-intervention movement was begining to gather its forces. The ISR, edited by Charles H. Kerr, regularly featured contributions from the ant […]